b. 1992

 

Sean Powers is an artist currently based out of Boulder, CO. Originally from Connecticut, Sean started their formal art education at Woodstock Academy in 2006, earning several Scholastic Art awards before being accepted on a merit scholarship to the BFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010. They started in film and video before focusing in the painting and drawing department where they showed work in an international group exhibition at the Zhu Jizhan Art Museum in Shanghai, China before completing their BFA in the Fall semester of 2014. Sean has since worked at Lillstreet Art Center, has studio assisted Chicago painter, Margot Bergman, and helped install the 2016 Masters of the American West exhibition at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, CA. Now based in Boulder, CO, Sean continues to make and show work blending painting, drawing, relief and functional objects. Their new body of work conveys a narrative interrelating subjects of environmental change, sociocultural evolutions, space exploration and theories of particle physics.

   

    Sean says of their work:

 

    The process of creating my work is sort of like a cross between narrating with imagery and watching an image spontaneously emerge through paint. I’m interested in the literal and metaphorical nature of an image; the way different subjects can interrelate through abstraction and representation and how the subjects’ forms communicate something literal while suggest something metaphorical in the mind of the viewer. The subjects I’m working with have a literal relationship to one another in the current world and an abstract relationship through their concept, function and form. I use art history, abstraction, representation, design and other techniques to bridge these different images together in a way that is equally literal and ambiguous in content.

    The inspirations for my narratives are weird and diverse. Art history has influenced me greatly, I look at many different cultures’ art traditions. While at college I studied Chinese, European, Outsider and Modern art history. Art history is like a library of human creativity and consciousness, and its shown me the diversity of necessity for style. Style is a way to convey meaning and function, and its dependent on what we feel and know.

    I read a lot, currently I have been pouring over the works of Nietzsche, Michio Kaku, Patanjali and Joseph Campbell. Philosophy, myths, spirituality, science, design and idiosyncratic styles inspire my narratives and my taste for art. Movements in art history correlated to these inspirations have directed my interest through its discourses.

    Perhaps my imagination and inspirations are the archetypal structures for how I perceive life, but I am very inspired by my contemporary situation of the world and find it relevant, almost like an echo of stories that have inspired me, whether they be ancient legends or science fiction. My narrative pictures are rooted in the current and past traditions of human cultures and psyche, but I seek to create a new picture that conveys the contemporary mystery of this narrative and its evolution from the past.